\begin{abstract}

Recent work by F. Ulmer and co-authors has focussed attention on the construction of good error-correcting codes in (non-commutative) skew polynomial rings. This new approach has resulted in the discovery of a rich class of error-correcting codes, analogous with cyclic codes, having parameters in some cases improve upon those of previously best-known codes.

This project is aimed at investigating those skew-cyclic codes that are also low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, and hence can be decoded using iterative message-passing algorithms. It is known that some excellent LDPC are cyclic, so it is reasonable to conjecture that the class of skew-cyclic codes may also contain some excellent LDPC codes. LDPC codes are interesting for practical reasons: they can be decoded with reasonable decoding complexity at channel operating points approaching the so-called "Shannon limit".


\end{abstract}
